


Numbers

by TheDemonLedger



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: Depression, Established Relationship, Gen, Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Car Accident, Mind the Tags, Non-Explicit Suicide Attempt, References to Depression, Sad, Sad with a Happy Ending, Suicide Attempt, Tearjerker, Trigger Warnings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-04
Updated: 2019-08-04
Packaged: 2020-07-31 05:34:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20109958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDemonLedger/pseuds/TheDemonLedger
Summary: I feel numb. I feel numb in this kingdom.Based off the song Numbers by Daughter. Katniss and her mother struggle after the death of Prim and Mr. Everdeen by drunk driver. Mind the tags, read the beginning note.





	Numbers

**Author's Note:**

> Hi,  
This story is probably one of the most bittersweet things I've ever written. I'm trying to get ahead on FC&C so I thought I'd post a oneshot for today. I'm sorry in advance if it triggers anything for you, so please mind the tags. Still, here are the  
**Trigger Warnings**: Mention of depression, non-graphic discussion of a suicide attempt, talk of death, talk of a car accident, and a lot of explicit discussion of what it feels like to grieve in a depressed state. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy this incredibly sad story. I cried while writing it, so I hope it sparks something for you as well.

I started counting the seconds as soon as he showed up at our door, looking stricken. My father had been a valuable member of the community, a military vet turned firefighter who volunteered summers at the community center teaching kids how to shoot bows and carve small chunks of wood into something beautiful. My sister - well, Prim was a marvel all on her own. Graduating, becoming valedictorian, captain of the soccer team, short stop on the softball team, dating my best friend’s brother. So, I started counting the seconds as soon as Dave Undersee showed up at our front door, his eyes red-rimmed and glossy. I lost count as soon as they were in the ground. But I think this emptiness, this hollow lack of humanity was something that started before the burial, while I was standing beside the grave and the gunshots fired overhead. I don’t know why one person dictated that black should be worn to a funeral, but I clutched my mothers hand tightly as rain poured and our black dresses and suit jackets were soaked; for one small, humorless second, I felt trapped in a movie, like someone would tap me on the shoulder and yell ‘_SURPRISE_' and my sister and my father would jump out from behind a rock or a headstone and we would all laugh and go home and have coffee and ice cream.

But that didn’t happen. I just swallowed and kept counting while three men fired seven shots in their military blues. When we tossed the first handful of dirt onto the casket after it had been dropped into the cement box, I felt it: the weight, this pressure that had been building since the second I opened the door that fell on me and coated me in tar. I couldn’t think, I just had to remember to breathe. When I raised my eyes from the black casket, I saw Peeta watching me with a sad, pitying expression. I couldn’t breathe. People patted my back as they walked away from the grave. Peeta came up and held my hand for a long few minutes, until I pulled it away and sank to my knees in the mud. Then he just brushed his fingers over my hair and left, like everybody else.

#

My mother is already in bed when I get home much later from the grave site. I can hear her wails but I can’t - haven’t been able to - cry tears of my own. I just feel this empty weight, a looming blackness, a dark agony that eats me from the inside out. I stop by the fridge, just to see if I can feign hunger, but find the emptiness can’t be filled by anything and stumble, wet and muddy, to the bedroom. My phone’s been going off in my purse all night, but I can’t bring myself to answer it, and instead I strip out of my wet funeral clothes and shove them deep into my hamper. I don’t know what I’ll do with them, probably burn them, but I know I can’t look at them right now. I stand in my bedroom, naked and shaking, trying to decide between the blissful ignorance of sleep and the comfort of a hot shower. The energy it takes to dig around in my drawer for a new pair of underwear and a tank top is enough to send me to bed, shivering while trying to pull clothes over my still damp skin.

#

It’s a long time later when anything significant wakes me from what could have been sleep, but felt more like the voice between waking and dying. At first I can’t place the feeling, just know it’s a quiet discomfort, and then I realize it’s the gnawing pangs of hunger. I curl my bed covers tighter around me and try not to breathe, hoping that I could pass out instead of trying to fight the growling of my stomach. For a moment I think someone might be knocking on the front door, but realize it’s my mother, tapping her knuckles against the wall that separates her bedroom from Prim’s. As though the routine of knocking before sleep could bring her back, or him back, or anybody back. It’s that desperate sadness that eliminates my hunger and makes me crave sleep stronger.

I tap back, though, just to let her know I’m here.

#

Sometimes I wake up to listen for my mom, so afraid the depression she’d been long subject to would take her without warning.

There’s long stretches of quiet where she doesn’t make any noise and my fear picks up, and then I can hear her move in her bed or sob loudly into her pillow, and I roll over and try to sleep again. Sometimes she raps her knuckles against the wall again, trying to pull me out of whatever dark state I’m in, and I rap back, a wordless communication.

I feel numb. _I feel numb in this kingdom. _

# 

My phone is ringing loudly on the floor. That’s what’s waking me up this new time, rather than the incredible silence coming from my mothers room. I close my eyes and try to sleep against it, but it keeps going and going and finally I throw the bed clothes off and tiptoe to the purse I’d left wet and dejected on the carpet. Within, my phone’s loud, trilling notification sound makes my heart hammer harder. Gale’s face looks back at me, the goofy photo he’d set as his profile almost cracking a smile. I slide my finger to answer the phone.

“Yeah?”

“Need anything?”

“For everyone to stop calling.”

“Need me to come over?”

“Need people to leave me alone.”

“You can’t be alone forever, Katniss.”

“No, but I can be alone for now.”

I hang up before Gale can insist and drop both purse and phone back onto the floor, my apathy coming out in spades.

#

When I wake up again it’s to the sound of the toilet flushing and my mom’s soft knock against my door. I rub my sleepy hands over my face; it’s covered in pillow lines and sticky from tears induced by nightmares I don’t remember having.

“Come in,” I rasp, and she does. She climbs into my bed and pulls me close to her and for a long, sick moment, I think about pushing her out of my bed and being alone again but instead I let her rest her face in my hair and cry gentle tears into my pillow and I fall asleep thinking of Prim and what this would have meant to her. My dreams are plagued by memories of Prim crawling into my bed after nightmares or fights with mom, where she curled up between me and the wall and told me about her dreams.

It’s something I wish I could forget with everything I have inside of me, but cling to with every inch of my humanity.

#

I try to wake up enough to feed us, to shove something down our throats so our catatonic states are at least fueled and not running dry. My mother calls out from work again. I call out from work again. They tell us to take all the time in the world. I feed us bacon and scrambled eggs and toast and I try not to look at Prim’s spot at the kitchen table. Her laughter haunts the house, and her bedroom door stays resolutely shut. It’s a wonder my mother can even sleep in her own room, with the ghost of my father looming over her in pictures and clothes and smell.

My mother eats vacantly.

I try to remember the last time I went to the bathroom.

Peeta calls, but I don’t answer. Gale calls and I don’t answer. Jo calls and

and I don’t answer.

#

I keep up the routine, the resting and the eating and the staring at the ceiling. The next time I call into work, my manager tells me to take the rest of the week off, that she’ll find coverage and not to worry about it. I wasn’t worried. It’s a coffeeshop, not the rest of my life.

I’m more concerned about the way my mother stares into space without seeing, the way her eyes glaze over when I try to talk about things that need to get done around the house, her small, almost invisible body disappearing beneath the blankets on our couch or her bed or my room. It’s all too much, it feels too real, too awful, to certain. But I am just a daughter and a sister - I didn’t fall in love, and I didn’t birth a now dead child.

I can’t, for one single second, even begin to place myself in my mother’s shoes, and so I don’t blame her for wanting to vanish totally.

#

The house is dark when I hear it, about a week after the funeral; it’s a bodily thump against the floor or the wall and I’m out of bed before I know what I’m doing, my heart racing in my aching chest. I knew the noise, heard it before all of this happened in the dark days of my mother’s ever present and resolutely persistent manic states. I’m at the bathroom door and hammering on it, trying to shove against the lock but I’m too small, too weak, and I begging her to let me in, for it to not be happening now, not again __I can’t lose her too__. She doesn’t answer and my head is pounding. Image are crashing against the dark of my eyelids; I’m blinded by caustic visions of her self-inflicted death. A violent shudder overtakes me and I drop to my knees before I can rise to find my phone. Everything is too real, too certain, too much.

In my bedroom, I yank my phone from the charger and shove it between my ear and my shoulder, the emergency line buzzing as I dig through my drawers for pants.

“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”

“I think my mother’s trying to kill herself.”

“Alright, we’re sending someone to you now, just stay on the line with me.”

“Please hurry.”

“What’s your name, dear?”

“Katniss Everdeen.”

“And your mother?”

“Emily.”

“Does your mother have any past history of mental illness?”

__That’s all she’s made up of, all she is, her entire history-__ “Yes, she’s been hospitalized before.”

“Alright, someone will be with you really soon. Can you get to your mom?”

“She’s locked herself in the bathroom.”

“Okay, Katniss, go ahead and go to the bathroom and tell me if you can hear anything through the door, okay?”

“Okay.” I pace on numb feet, hands shaking and heart breaking. I can’t lose her too. I remove the phone from my ear to press it against the door. It’s quiet. So quiet. I knock softly a few times on the wood and receive no response. I knock again, more insistent - still nothing.

“Nothing.”

“Alright, any minute now, they should be with you. Can you unlock your door?”

“Yes.” The couch is warm and soft when I sink down onto it after my duties have ended. The operator on the other end of the line speaks in dulcet tones, reminding me to breathe, telling me everything will be okay.

Nothing will be okay.

#

Gale is at the hospital five minutes after I make the call to him. And soon, he and Peeta and Jo are running down the hall to me, where I stand outside my mother's room pacing and waiting and praying - something I don’t do anymore. I don’t know how they all got here so fast. I don’t ask questions about it, either. They all wrap me up in their arms and whisper platitudes to me that don’t make me feel better but couldn’t possibly make me feel worse. I’m a mess and I know it from the look of regret in Peeta’s eyes. He presses a soft kiss to my forehead and draws me in alone this time and I’m reminded of all the good in the world when I breathe in his cinnamon and clove musk. Everything breaks when his fingers run gentle trails down my spine; sobs rip from me and I guess I’d needed to cry this whole time.

“Katniss,” Jo says, her voice softer than I have ever heard it. “Do you need anything from us?” I shake my head when I draw away from Peeta, though I keep my fingers firmly locked through his.

“Just,” I turn a little, so my eyes can track over Peeta’s weathered expression and tired eyes. “Stay with me.” My voice is weak and we all find spots in the waiting room, desolate and empty and since one of the chairs is like a bench, I can stretch out with my head on Peeta’s lap and let him wash away the tears with his soft words and nimble fingers. 

#

I don’t know when my mother wakes up. She’s in a fog for a long time, and even though I want to stay with her, the hospital bills won’t pay themselves. I go back to work and sling coffee to people completely unaware of the tragedies I have played a part in; they know me less than I know them. I can barely remember how to steam milk, and sometimes it bubbles over onto my hand. The burns remind me that I am human and can be hurt. For a moment it’s comforting, and then terrifying, because __am I turning into my mother -__ desperate for the physical manifestation of the emotional bankruptcy inside me? I shake the terrifying thought away.

My mother is released one full week after her initial check in, prescribed three new meds and a therapist. Her hospital mandates a psych evaluation before she can come back.

She passes.

Because grief is not the same as insanity, I reason. Even if it feels like it is.

Her therapist tells her I should start seeing someone too, that three traumas in one week is enough for anyone to break in half, and I know that the doctor is right.

#

The woman who sees me is a soft spoken, pretty woman with a vine tattoo down the side of her head. She introduces herself as Cressida and I find myself repeating the name for something to do when there’s nothing left for me to say about death. She asks me about my days and has me recount the good things and the bad things and isn’t afraid to shoot straight with me.

When I tell her about Peeta, and the push and pull I find myself in with him, she tells me to relax. Take a few deep breaths and let him talk sometimes, because I can extrapolate false correlations and jump to conclusions.

When she asks about Prim, I clam up. There’s nothing in the world more sacred than my sister. I don’t know what to say, so I don’t speak, and she waits, and sometimes it takes the whole session for me to say three words: __I love her.__ But at the end, when Cressida nods and puts her clipboard away and ushers me slowly to her frosted glass door, she puts a hand gently on my shoulder and I know that I’ve said just enough.

#

Haymitch comes to my work most days, since the retired fireman has nothing better to do and is too ornery to admit he needs company as much as the rest of us. He drinks americanos and read the newspaper and watches me over the frames of his reading glasses until I scowl at him and tell him to order something new or get lost. Then he laughs and asks for a refill until he’s done with the sports section and visit my mother, assured of something, though I’m not sure what.

#

Four months pass before I’m able to smile with my whole body again. Peeta lays across my bed, winded from a run and sweating. He glances up where I work at the table on a project for class. Something about Prim being gone had made me want to carry on for her, attend school and see what the world could offer, even if it was only community college and I wasn’t even sure what I was meant to be studying yet.

“Katniss,” he says with a smile bright enough to light up the room. “You have paint on your earlobe.”

“What?” I say, bringing a hand up to my ear to wipe it away and, sure enough, there’s bright blue paint smeared there and even in wondering how it got there, I’m reminded of the color of Prim’s eyes and how her 19th birthday is only a few weeks away and feel, suddenly, the need to laugh.

So I laugh. The sound startles Peeta, who’d been trying to coax the noise from me since my mother’s hospitalization, and he jumps up.

“You good?” he asks, and I’m nodding and laughing and crying and I feel a hundred things that I thought I’d never feel again. I reach a hand out to him and pull him towards me, stinking of sweat but smelling sweet like the end of summer and grass and his usual cinnamon aroma. My laughter makes it hard to stand, hard to breath or move or do anything I need to do, but I stand and wrap my skinny arms around his wide shoulders and hug him as tightly as I can.

“I love you,” I whisper, and even though it’s not the first time, I can feel Peeta’s shock in the freeze of his movements and he backs up.

“Are you okay, Kat?” he asks again and I’m nodding. Nodding and remembering my sister and pushing the memories away so I can start touching Peeta again because I can’t do both, but I have to get the words out before they go away.

“I want to have a party,” I say softly, voicing some deep need within me, but I’m pushing him back towards the bed and sinking down onto him and whispering about the party into his ear while his hands trail over my skin.

And I can finally feel something other than hurt.

#

It’s a Tuesday; that’s when we have the party. My mother drinks water out of a tall, clear glass with a lemon wedge floating halfway between top and bottom, and she surveys the surroundings. Finnick and Annie Odair came, her protuberant belly a sign of good change; Jo sits between Gale and Haymitch, talking about nothing and everything and her voice is the second thing filling the room; Madge watches Gale struggle to keep up with Jo’s effervescent energy with an amused face; Rory stands beside me and Peeta, and for the first time every, I see him cry. It’s a happy day, a party filled with some of Prim’s favorite people, and the people who cherished Prim, but I can’t help but feel like something is missing.

My mother disappears into her bedroom, and for a moment I’m afraid it was a mistake, but she brings out an old, leather-bound photo album and my sister’s Polaroid and waves us all together. I smile through the bite of my tears and try to keep from breaking. The night goes on and Gale breaks out his guitar for me to sing some of Prim’s favorite songs and he’s gruffly intoning Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard and I think my father would have been proud of just how far we’d come.

#

There are still days of darkness, like any loss.

When Peeta proposes to me a year after the accident, I break down and can’t breath or move; he finally coaxes me out of my hole and I admit that it feels wrong to get married without her there, or my father to walk me down the aisle.

“Katniss,” he whispers, stroking the hair back from my face. “Love, she will always be there.” He smiles and brushes fresh tears off my face. “And I can think of at least three men who would be happy to walk with you, if you’d let them.”

So I let them.

#

Haymitch’s hand is warm under mine. My mother’s face is bright with tears, but she stands where Prim would have, and watches me with such adoration, I wonder how I ever forgot she loves me, too.

It’s not perfect, but when is anything ever perfect?

**Author's Note:**

> As always, if you enjoyed, subscribe to my page for more Hunger Games (and other) content.  
If you want, leave a kudo, drop a comment, tell me what you liked, bookmark me up. It always helps me get hits on my stuff, and am forever appreciative of it. 
> 
> xx - Olive


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